Climate Projections

Last update: Jan. 2018

Introduction

We regularly hear in the news that temperatures are rising, that atmospheric content of aerosols should increase, and that we should also probably face an increase of soiling of solar installations... And all this will affect our health, future access to solar energy, and many other domains. In the meantime, SoDa received numerous requests from Users who would need to know how an estimation of the solar potential and the yield assessed at day D is still relevant during the lifetime of their solar projects, and also further in the future.

To address these issues, MINES ParisTech takes part to the European Climatic Energy Mixes (ECEM) project consortium (~2015-early 2018). The main purpose of ECEM is to enable the energy industry and policy makers to assess how well energy supply will meet demand in Europe over different time horizons, focusing on the role climate has on energy supply and demand. Transvalor joined the ECEM team during the ECEM-athon, an intensive week of work (6-10 Nov. 2017) to investigate how SoDa could benefit from the diverse outcomes of ECEM.

An extension of the program for 2 more years to achieve a operational level of readiness of the current pre-operational services available in both ECEM and CLIM4ENERGY projects, and also to keep on promoting the current demonstrator.

Demonstrator

This is a new world for the SoDa team and the SoDa community, which implies a large volume of acronyms and basics knowledge about climate to ingest. This knowledge is a prior compulsory step to reach the sufficient skills to use the ECEM Demonstrator, a plat-form for the exploration of different scenarios and models developed within the project.

Key Messages

We also really enjoyed the use cases already available on the ECEM Demonstrator concerning the temperatures available in the bottom menu on the left hand side in the section "Key messages and pre-prepared graphs". In praticuler, we invite you to read:

"A Warming Europe": is a conclusion that can been drawn using the historic air temperature data for 1979-2016.

"A Warmer future": climate projections for Europe show a warming continuing to the end of the century under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario (RCP8.5). The plot available on the page of this key message shows the average projection among seven different Regional Climate Models (RCMs) for summer and for seven countries.